Today, Write.as is mainly built for writers – we’re built to give you an easy, frictionless way to publish online. But at this stage, we’re considering expanding into some new uses. In particular, we’re interested in supporting digital publications that are larger than just personal blogs – think something close to a Medium publication, with multiple authors publishing under a single banner.
This would involve as few changes to the platform as possible, to keep our minimalism and usefulness to the core group of writers publishing here today. We’ll continue stopping short of becoming an elaborate Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress. But it may involve new integrations and other functionality behind the scenes that normal writers won’t have to bother with.
So! We’re trying to gauge interest in this potential direction, and would love your input. Please feel free to vote in this poll:
I have a publication and would consider running it on Write.as
I don’t have a publication, but would consider starting one on Write.as
I have a publication, but no interest in running it on Write.as
This doesn’t apply to me
Other (leave comment)
0voters
And if you are interested in a new solution for a publication, we’d also love to hear your thoughts in this thread. Thanks!
Clicked the wrong one. I clicked “I have a publication but no interest”. While, to be true, I had publications on Medium but don’t run them anymore so maybe this doesn’t apply to me.
On the technical side, this might be implemented directly in Write.as, or as a new configuration setting for your WriteFreely community. So whereas today a multi-user WriteFreely instance is like an open-access publication, we might add a setting that puts your users in different roles, e.g. “writer” and “editor”, allowing for more control over what’s published.
But as for feedback here, we’re looking to see who would be interested this functionality in general, no matter how it’s implemented.
In the first version of Medium there was an interesting feature, which was later deleted: each author could submit one of his posts or article to one or more particular “Publications” or “Collections”, in addition to being published on his own blog.
A truly innovative concept that in a way allowed the boundary between personal and collective publication to be shifted. And at the same time to group stories and writings by themes or particular interests.
I could imagine, for example, if I chronicle a book about Herb Lubalin’s work on my personal blog, this post could also be included in a “Collection” devoted to the history of typography. Or, perhaps, this post can be published directly in this “Collection” and just announced on my blog. Even more, it can be published at the same time on another “Collection” dedicated to graphic design in general…
Something like the read.write.as publishing feed, but with a multitude of possible combinations and declinations, which reinvents the very notion of publication itself.
I don’t have anything in mind @matt, but if I were to make it big some day (lol) It would be nice to not have to leave the platform. Maybe if it could be a plugin type system for different needed features?
It isn’t necessarily a larger publication, but I want to do something a bit different. I’d like to build a web directory with Write As. In other words, I’d update the directory by hand. This would need to involve category support, and ongoing archives not sure if those are implemented or not.
What I mean by category support is like with WP, although it’s mostly fallen out of fashion. There’s a category widget, and when someone clicks a particular link, they can see everything on that page. It doesn’t really matter if it’s paginated or not but if so, it should be by 50 or 100 items most likely.
OK apparently Write As uses hashtags, which are fine for me. Other features that would be cool to add are search, since directory… ya know… and RSS for each tag. The RSS thing may already exist, not sure.
Yes, RSS feeds are available for a blog, just append /feed to the end of the link. For example, here’s the feed for one of Matt’s blogs: https://write.as/matt/feed
Regarding hashtags, cjeller1592 wrote a little utility that will list all the hashtags for your blog, it’s at http://wa-tags.glitch.me/ His forum post explaining it is here
Yeah, I understand there are RSS feeds for blogs. What I was getting at is an RSS feed for each hashtag. It would be like the Lifehacker tag feeds. [[https://lifehacker.com/tag/webapps/rss]] Also twitrss.me used to be a service that would let you generate RSS from twitter hashtags and users. Also, the tag listing thing looks cool, but is there a way to embed a hashtag search like that into the blog?
That feature of Medium was pretty great. I don’t think I ever used it myself, but that approach, a kind of built-in crowdsourcing for publication articles, was kind of innovative, I thought.
Can you please include the RSS feed for one’s blog somewhere in the UI. I had to dig around and eventually check out the forums here before I could discover where the feed was
Last Summer (2022), I ran a 10-week project to help folks write for 10 minutes a week (I ended up advertising it for ADHD writers, but everyone was welcome). More than a 100 people took part, writing on their own ‘blogs’ (Google Docs) in a shared space (A Google Doc linking to each ‘blog’); the engagement was good and lots of writing happened.
It went well, but running it on GoogleDrive was a very manual process, and there was no way for commenting, etc. I didn’t have the skills to build my own 'Version 2. I explored learning no-code / building some kind of Medium clone using Bubble; but it was beyond the time/capabilities I had). Some kind of Write.As publication or private instance for several writers would have been great for this!
